First World, Ha, Ha, Ha!


Elaine Katzenberger - 1995
    At a demonstration in Mexico City, over 100,000 people marched together and shouted, First World, HA HA HA!—a defiant declaration of solidarity with the rebels, an insurgent army of indigenous campesinos who have challenged the direction of Mexico's future.The Chiapas uprising was internationally hailed as a direct attack on the New World Order. It was a milestone in the continuing history of indigenous resistance in the Americas, and an important development in the growing worldwide struggle against global policies of economic colonization.In this collection, writers from Mexico and the United States provide the background and context for the Zapatista movement, and explore its impact, in Mexico and beyond."Elaine Katzenberger has assembled an interesting and stimulating collection of voices from Mexico and the United States, of those in revolt and those reacting to the revolt. . . . Listened to as moments of an ever wider and ever more multi-sided conversation, the voices in the book should contribute to that amplification by giving their listeners a sense of the complexity and breath of the discussion." — Harry Cleaver, Professor at University of TexasElaine Katzenberger is a publisher and Executive Director for City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. Her edited works include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Some works have won awards including the American Book Award and a PEN West Award for Excellence in Publishing. Katzenberger serves on the Board of Directors of the City Lights Foundation and is on the Advisory Board of Circuit Network.

Basta!: Land And The Zapatista Rebellion In Chiapas


George A. Collier - 1994
    With a new afterword by the author about Chiapas today and its successes and failures.

Keeping the Rabble in Line: Interviews with David Barsamian


Noam Chomsky - 1994
    He outlines his views on a wide range of issues, including health care, global warming and more.

The Media Monopoly


Ben H. Bagdikian - 1983
    Once called "alarmist," Bagdikian's claims are uncanny and chilling in their accuracyl This much-needed sixth edition follows up on the digital revolution, revealing startling details of a new communications cartel within the United States.

Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago


James Miller - 1987
    Democracy Is in the Streets is the definitive history of the major people and ideas that shaped the New Left in America during that turbulent decade. Because the 1960s generation is now moving into positions of power in politics, education, the media, and business, their early history is crucial to our understanding. James Miller, in his new Preface, puts the 1960s and them into a context for our time, claiming that something of value did happen: "Most of the large questions raised by that moment of chaotic openness--political questions about the limits of freedom, and cultural questions, too, about the authority of the past and the anarchy of the new--are with us still."

Bordering on Chaos: Mexico's Roller-Coaster Journey Toward Prosperity


Andrés Oppenheimer - 1996
    of photos.

Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression


Dale Maharidge - 2011
    Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life—through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis—the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media—people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). In Someplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study—begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe—puts a human face on today’s grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.

Fidel & Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism & Liberation Theology


Fidel Castro - 1985
    The talk is informal and far-ranging, and Betto's questions are often provocative (‘Does Cuba export revolution?’).”—Publishers WeeklyThe product of an intimate 23-hour dialogue between Fidel Castro and Brazilian liberation theologist Frei Betto, this was a Simon & Schuster bestseller in the 1980s. Here Castro speaks candidly about his views on religion and his education in elite Catholic colleges, offering an insight into the man behind the beard.Features a new translation and a unique selection of photos of Fidel as a boy.

On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey


Paul Theroux - 2019
    Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples that give life to the places they call home. Now, as immigration debates boil around the world, Theroux has set out to explore a country key to understanding our current discourse: Mexico. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. With the same humanizing sensibility he employed in Deep South, Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north. From the writer praised for his “curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms” (New York Times Book Review), On the Plain of Snakes is an exploration of a region in conflict.

Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia


Garry Leech - 2008
    Beyond Bogotá is framed around the eleven hours that Leech was held captive by the FARC, Colombia's largest leftist guerrilla group, in August of 2006. He recalls nearly thirty years of travel and work in Latin America while weaving in a historical context of the region and on-the-ground reporting with each passing hour of his detention.More than $5 billion in U.S. aid over the past seven years has failed to end Colombia's civil conflict or reduce cocaine production. Leech finds that ordinary Colombians, not drug lords, have suffered the most and that peasants and indigenous peoples have been caught in the crossfire between the armed groups. Meanwhile, more than thirty Colombian journalists have been murdered over the last three decades, making Colombia one of the most dangerous countries in which to practice journalism. Consequently, the majority of the Western media rarely leave Bogotá to find the real story. Leech, however, learns the truth about the conflict and the U.S. war on drugs directly from the source: poor coca farmers whose fields and food crops have been sprayed with toxic aerial fumigations, female FARC guerrillas who see armed struggle as their only option, union organizers whose lives are threatened because they defend workers' rights, indigenous peoples whose communities have been forcibly displaced by the violence, and many others. Leech also investigates the presence of multinational oil and mining companies in Colombia by gaining access to army bases where U.S. soldiers train Colombian troops to fight the guerrillas in resource-rich regions and by visiting local villages to learn what the foreign presence has meant for the vast majority of the population. Drawing on unprecedented access to soldiers, guerrillas, paramilitaries, and peasants in conflict zones and cocaine-producing areas, Leech's documentary memoir is an epic tale of a journalist's search for meaning in the midst of violence and poverty, as well as a humanizing firsthand account that supplies fresh insights into U.S. foreign policy, the role of the media, and the plight of everyday Colombians caught in the midst of a brutal war.

Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America


Walter F. LaFeber - 1983
    This second edition is updated to include new material covering the Reagan and Bush years, and the Iran/Contra affair.

Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America


John Charles Chasteen - 2000
    A concise, chronological history of Latin America spans six centuries and encompasses twenty countries as it discusses the people, events, and factors that shaped Latin America--including colonization, revolution, ethnic diversity, and the struggle for economic growth and political and social equality.

Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador


Suzana Sawyer - 2004
    As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements.Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality—that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging—as they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.

The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life


Lauren Markham - 2017
    But when Ernesto ends up on the wrong side of the region's brutal gangs he is forced to flee the country, and Raul, because he looks just like his brother, follows close behind--away from one danger and toward the great American unknown.In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the seventeen-year-old Flores twins as they make their harrowing journey across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother's custody in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating a new school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of life as American teenagers-girls, grades, Facebook-with only each other for support. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers a coming of age tale that is also a nuanced portrait of Central America's child exodus, an investigation of U.S. immigration policy, and an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience.

Odes to Opposites


Pablo Neruda - 1995
    For example, Ode to Fire is coupled with Ode to Rain. Each ode is written is Spanish and English and is prefaced by pencil drawings. Neruda won the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature.